Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal

New Myth, New World

From Nietzsche to Stalinism

Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal

“New Myth, New World is an original and provocative reinterpretation of Nietzsche's central impact on Soviet culture. Rosenthal has read widely and deeply in primary sources running from philosophy, religion, and poetics to political ideology, architecture, and street theater. In addition, she seems to know all the relevant scholarship, not just in English and Russian but also in German and French and other languages as well. This is a model of wide-ranging, well-informed historical research.” —John Burt Foster, George Mason University

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The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples of Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism.

Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were poets, philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing debates between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of an uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s.

In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on. In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche as the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois" individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the issues they had posed.

More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, New Myth, New World offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet ideology and its influence on the twentieth century.

“New Myth, New World is an original and provocative reinterpretation of Nietzsche's central impact on Soviet culture. Rosenthal has read widely and deeply in primary sources running from philosophy, religion, and poetics to political ideology, architecture, and street theater. In addition, she seems to know all the relevant scholarship, not just in English and Russian but also in German and French and other languages as well. This is a model of wide-ranging, well-informed historical research.” —John Burt Foster, George Mason University

“New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche To Stalinism by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal is a thoughtful and scholarly reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s lasting influence upon Soviet culture.” —Wisconsin Bookwatch

“Rosenthal’s mastery of the often intricate details of Russian and Soviet political thought is truly impressive and contributes dramatically to the credibility of her thesis. Her work will force scholars to reevaluate not only Nietzsche’s influence on twentieth-century thought but also the origins of Soviet culture. Anyone who wants to understand the evolution of Marxist-Leninist thought, in all of its manifestations, would do well to read New Myth, New World.” —Russel Lemmons, History: Reviews of New Books

“In New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal proposes a refreshing, unconventional approach to Nietzsche’s heritage, and demonstrates how ideas have a life of their own, influencing, in arcane ways, trends that may be the opposite of what their proponents claim.

Professor Rosenthal’s book is an exercise in cultural archeology: she excavates long-forgotten or neglected themes, symbols, ideas that have permeated various trends of the Russian tradition from the populists to the Bolsheviks.” —Vladimir Tismaneanu, Times Literary Supplement

“In her third book on Nietzsche and Russia, Rosenthal documents the persistence of Nietzsche in Russia’s history in a recondite and kaleidoscopic way. Her command of the topic shows. . . . Highly recommended.” —A. Ezergailis, Choice

“Rosenthal’s exploration of the ‘psychopolitical utility to myth’ (113) in New Myth, New World serves as a timely and thought-provoking guide through a key portion of this new territory. The reader will have to work through Rosenthal’s dense prose, close reasoning, and occasional bursts of associative analogy, but the reader will not be disappointed. This is an excellent work.” —Maria Carlson, Slavic and East European Journal

“The author’s scholarly intuition, which sometimes cuts across the work’s declared aims, notes and delineates a tendency, a set of problems which are obviously going to dictate the pattern of Nietzsche reception in Russia during the next few years.” —Julia Sineokaya, New Nietzsche Studies

Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal is Professor of History at Fordham University. She is the editor of three prior books that have paved the way for this study—Nietzsche in Russia (1986), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (1994), and The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (1997). She is also the co-author of A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890-1924 (1990).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Works Frequently Cited

Introduction

Section I: The Seed-Time: The Russification of Nietzsche, 1890–1917

1. Symbolists

2. Philosophers

3. Nietzschean Marxists

4. Futurists

Summary: The Nietzschean Agenda in 1917

Section II. Nietzsche in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, 1917–1921

5. Apocalypse Now: Bolshevik Fusions of Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche

6. Beyond Bolshevism: Visions of a Revolution of the Spirit

Section III. Nietzschean Ideas in the Period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), 1921–1927

7. Concretizing the Myth: New Cult, New Man, New Morality

8. New Forms, New Language, New Politics

Section IV. Echoes of Nietzsche in Stalin’s Time, 1928–1953

Part I: Dionysus Unleashed: The Cultural Revolution and the First Five-Year Plan

9. "Great Politics" Stalin-Style

10. Cultural Revolution in the Arts and Sciences

Part II: Art as a Lie: Nietzsche and Socialist Realism

11. Nietzsche’s Contributions to the Theory of Socialist Realism

12. The Theory Implemented

Part III: The Lie Triumphant: Nietzsche and Stalinist Political Culture

13. The Stalin Cult and Its Complements

14. Cultural Expressions of the Will to Power

Epilogue: De-Stalinization and the Reemergence of Nietzsche

Index

Introduction

The worst readers. The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops; they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

—HH, 2:245

All the aphorisms of Zarathustra

And the virgin soil of paradoxes.

Elegantly subtle sophistries—

All turned into blood.

—Nikolai Bukharin, "The Mad Prophet (Nietzsche)" (1937)

Some of the most powerful ideas are those that are hidden. This book excavates the long-obscured trail of ideas influenced by Nietzsche that entered into and helped shape Bolshevism and Stalinism. The excavation begins in late Imperial Russia, goes through the thickets of the revolutionary and early Soviet periods, and culminates in Stalin’s time. Throughout, Nietzsche’s thought was mediated by Russians who picked up the aspects of it that appealed to them and reconfigured them for their own purposes until they were transformed in ways that obscured their provenance. Without knowledge of Nietzsche’s thought, and Russian appropriations, modifications, and embellishments of it before the Bolshevik Revolution, the trail of Nietzschean ideas we will be following is virtually invisible, because for most of the Soviet period, either his name was unmentionable or it could be used only as a pejorative. By Nietzschean ideas, I mean ideas indebted to Nietzsche directly or at one or more removes. One did not have to read Nietzsche to be influenced by him. The pollen of his ideas hung in the atmosphere for decades, fertilizing many Russian and Soviet minds.

Nietzsche’s brilliant style and compelling images appealed to people everywhere, Russians included. His quotable aphorisms could be detached from their context and deployed in a variety of ways. "Tell me what you need," Kurt Tucholsky, a German writer, quipped, "and I will supply you with a Nietzsche citation." The bi-polar and complex nature of Nietzsche’s thought accommodates contradictory ideas and changing circumstances. Its open-endedness and ambiguity enables people to read their own meanings into such concepts as the Superman, the "will to power," and "great cultural projects." Nietzsche’s works provided intellectual ammunition for a prolonged conflict that was conducted in all areas of Russian life—culture, society, politics—a conflict over whose will, values, and ideals would prevail, in whose image the society of the future would be shaped.

The works of the "philosopher with a hammer" touched deep cultural chords, reverberating with, reinforcing, and reactivating ideas indigenous to Russia. His striking slogans and memorable images stayed with people long after they read him. Nietzsche was the spark that fused discrete, seemingly contradictory, elements into new amalgams, such as Nietzschean Marxism and Nietzschean Christianity. Some of these were unstable and transitory. Others endured and evolved, but one idea remained constant: art can create a new consciousness, a new human being, a new culture, and a new world. Nietzsche imbued radicals of various persuasions with visions of total transformation against which liberalism and evolutionary Marxism seemed pallid. Nietzsche enthusiasts seized on the eschatological and voluntarist aspects of Marxism to commandeer the existing Russian apocalypticism and to revitalize the voluntaristic and "heroic" aspects of the intelligentsia ethos.

Bolshevik intellectuals did not confine their reading to Marxist works. They knew Russian and European literature and philosophy and kept up with current trends in art and thought. Aspects of Nietzsche’s thought were either surprisingly compatible with Marxism or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche sensitized Bolsheviks committed to reason and science to the importance of the nonrational aspects of the human psyche and to the psychopolitical utility of symbol, myth, and cult. His visions of "great politics" (grosse Politik) colored their imaginations. Politik, like the Russian word politika, means both "politics" and "policy"; "grosse" has also been translated as "grand" or "large scale." The Soviet obsession with creating a new culture stemmed primarily from Nietzsche, Wagner, and their Russian popularizers. Marx and Engels never developed a detailed theory of culture because they considered it part of the superstructure that would change to follow changes in the economic base.

Nietzsche’s influence operated below the surface of events, accelerating the repudiation of established authorities and values, nourishing a panoply of utopian doctrines, reinforcing the Promethean aspects of Marxism, and contributing (along with other factors), to an eschatological mood and a free-floating radicalism that worked to the Bolsheviks’ advantage in 1917. Nietzsche’s thought affected aspects of Stalinism that explanations based on class conflict, rationally calculating "economic man," or modernization theory cannot account for.

Focusing on culture, rather than political events or social structure, I highlight a set of issues that I call the Nietzschean agenda. This agenda was established by his Russian admirers between 1890 and 1917, when Nietzsche could be discussed openly and his thought was russified and absorbed into the culture. Responding to the changes transforming their country, Nietzsche enthusiasts espoused new values and sought a new ideal (in Nietzschean terms, a new myth) by which to live and on which to base their work and transform their world. The other items on the agenda—a quest for a "new word," a new art form, a new ideal of man (and woman), a new morality, a new politics, and a new science—were related to the quest for a new myth. Nietzsche’s popularizers shaped the wider culture, disseminating their renditions of his ideas, and raising issues that were debated by Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and among the Bolsheviks, until the mid 1930s when the Communist Party resolved these issues. For close to half a century, then, the Nietzschean agenda thus passed from one generation to another, each generation offering new answers to the same questions and issues.

O N E

Symbolists

For the sake of the new beauty,

We will break all laws,

We will trespass all limits. —Dmitry Merezhkovsky,

"Deti nochi"

For the symbolists, the key Nietzsche text was The Birth of

Tragedy, even though much of their imagery stemmed from

Zarathustra. They were dazzled by Nietzsche’s aesthetic justification

of the world and human existence, his celebration

of the Dionysian, and his belief that myth is essential

to the health of a culture. Their primary interests were art,

culture, and the "inner man" (the soul or the psyche).

Spiritual radicals, they interpreted the "will to power" as

creativity, detested the quotidian aspects of life (byt), and

unlike Nietzsche, held that empirical reality is but a symbol

of a higher reality that can be apprehended intuitively.

Opposed to positivism, rationalism, and materialism, they

imagined "other worlds than ours" and plumbed the depths

of the human soul. Rejecting the "slavish" kenotic values

of humility, altruism, and asceticism, they hailed Nietzsche as

a proponent of self-affirming individualism and enjoyment

of life, a trespasser of forbidden boundaries and established moral codes,

and highlighted his paeans to laughter and to dancing. Later on, however,

they denounced individualism as atomistic or decadent and restored one or

more of the kenotic values (which ones depended on the symbolist), defending

their turnabout with different quotations from Nietzsche. Their myths

featured a leap from necessity to freedom in the cosmic, rather than the

Marxist, sense, and the transfiguration of man and the world through art.

The symbolist poet would articulate the salvific "new word."

The leading symbolists were Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), the initiator